Synopsis
Eh Joe is the complete antithesis to ... but the clouds ... in which a man strains nightly to evoke the image of a woman with little success. Like O in Film, Joe has gone through his routine, doing what he feels he needs to do to protect himself and like the man in Film he is sitting quietly thinking he is safe. But he is not. It is not a face he finds watching himself but a voice he hears, a woman’s voice. As the voice progresses we move closer and closer to Joe.
To Alan Schneider, Beckett wrote on 7 April 1966: "Voice should be whispered. A dead voice in his head. Minimum of colour. Attacking. Each sentence a knife going in, pause for withdrawal, then in again."
36” – The voice wants to know if Joe has checked everything. Why is he still sitting there with the light on? Why doesn’t he go to bed? He’s changed the covers.
32” – She reminds him that he’d told her that the best was still to come but that it was the last thing he did say to her as he hurried her into her coat and bundled her out the door.
28” – She is not the first voice that has come to him like this, in his mind; although the woman hints that the source may be external. His father’s voice came to him for years until Joe found a way to stop him talking, to metaphorically throttle him, then his mother and finally, others, “ll the others”, everyone it seems who ever loved him.
24” – She asks if there is anyone left who might love him. He’s reduced to paying for sex, once a week. She warns him to be careful he doesn’t run out of people to take advantage of because then there would only be him left to adore him until he too died. She assures him that she is not in heaven and not to expect to go there himself.
20” – The woman recalls one time the two of them were together. It was summer, they were sitting together on the grass watching the ducks, holding hands and exchanging vows. He’d complimented her on her elocution and she remarks how well he used to express himself. Now, like he did with his parents and the others, he has “queezed her down to this”, the slow monotonous drone we hear. She knows her time is limited and wonders when all she will have left is a whisper. She lashes out at him and asks him to imagine if he never managed to rid himself of her until he died and was with her in death himself.
16”– Joe has been a religious man. She wants to know if he’s as righteous as he used to profess to be. She quotes from the parable of Jesus about the rich man and says one day God will talk to him like she is doing and, when he does, it’ll be time for him to die.
12” – Joe had said that the best was to come. She tells him that, for her at least, it did. She found someone far better than he was and lists off all the ways.
8” – She did all right. “But there was one didn’t.” One of Joe’s other loves, a young, slim, pale girl did not fare so well. He said the same thing to her that the best was yet to come, just as he did with Voice, as he bundled the girl out the door with no intention of furthering the relationship now he’d got what he wanted from her. In fact his aeroplane ticket was in his pocket ready for him to make good his escape. The timeline is unclear but the likelihood is that his relationship with Voice came first.
4” – She wants to know if Joe knew what happened to her, if she’d told him. Of course she hadn’t. The first he’d heard about it was an announcement in the Independent. Joe tries harder to throttle the voice. She knows her time is short and begins to goad him. “Mud thou art,” she tells him – more commonly heard as “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” – Genesis 3:19.
0” – The woman proceeds to tell him what exactly happened to the girl he abandoned. Voice describes her going down to the sea close to her house wearing only her lavender slip where she attempts to drown herself but it doesn’t work. The girl returns to the house, sopping wet, fetches a razor – the make Joe recommended to her – goes back down the garden, this time to the viaduct, where she also fails to slit her wrists. She tears a strip of silk from her slip and ties it round the scratch. She goes back to the house and this time gets some tablets. She takes a few on her way back down the garden. When she reaches the viaduct she decides to head further down near the Rock and takes some more on the way. When she reaches the spot she empties the tube and lies down in the end with her face a few feet from the – presumably incoming – tide.
At this point Beckett added the following instruction, which is not included in the printed text: “Eyes remember.”
Joe makes a concerted effort at this point and the woman’s voice drops to a whisper. She makes Joe imagine the girl lying there, describing events in erotic terms: “… part the lips … solitaire … Breasts in the stones …Imagine the hands … What are they fondling? … There’s love for you …” Another change Beckett made here was to add in a greater degree of repetition, particularly the word “imagine” emphasising that what we are hearing here is primarily a work of imagination rather than simple recollection.
The voice falls silent and the image fades out. Joe has finally rid himself of her. As his face vanishes we realise he is smiling, an important addition Beckett made to the play but which was never incorporated in the printed text. “Here, for the first time, Joe looks at the camera”. This may not represent a final victory but he has silenced her for now.
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